Jon is a flâneur of words and the Internet who created, wrote and directed (mainly by Direct Message) the first ever piece of drama to be performed on Twitter. Back in 2008 he persuaded a cast including MP Tom Watson to give over their timelines to perform Twitpanto: a full length piece of theatre that spun its story out into the unsuspecting online World. He’s organised psychogeographic trips around Birmingham’s Outer Circle, measured the emotional wellbeing of the city, started ‘Talk Like a Brummie Day’, and as well as founding the famous blog Birmingham: It’s Not Shit. He currently edits Paradise Circus: A Birmingham Miscellany. All of his projects work in the space where emotion and place collide—online and off.

He’s currently finishing a book about visiting every seaside pier in England and Wales — Pier Review — which has been described as “On the Road meets On the Buses”.

Jon was the ’14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands’ 2008. Subsequently not placed.

Boring post this, it’s just for Google to in case any other people are looking to see what’s happened.

I popped and got an iPhone 4 the other day, it’s nice (and it won’t cost me much once I recycle the old 3G – and the battery was dying).

I decided to stay with O2, I’ve not had problems with them and changing providers is fraught with hassle. The guys in the shop made it quite easy — except that I’ve discovered that the salesman lied to me to sell an insurance policy. This is a proper O2 shop (the receipt says Telefonica O2 UK Ltd and everything).

The salesman told me that insurance was compulsory on iPhone4 upgrades. That sounded fishy and I said I did not want it, only to be told a that it was free for 14 days and that I could cancel without being charged. I asked how, just to confirm, and they said by phone.

Then received my bill via email this am and that charged me for insurance at £15. The customer service rep on the telephone has refunded that and cancelled the insurance — confirming that there’s no such thing as compulsory insurance. But as it is credited in the next month’s bill, how many £15s are O2 receiving and getting interest on for one month? How many people don’t check or cancel. How much commission is the liar (fraudster?) making.

The Sun publish News in Briefs, which is simply-written right-wing content supposedly said by topless model. So Jon Hickman thought it would work with boobs swapped out for kitties…

Friday, January 22nd – HOLLIE, 22, from Manchester

HOLLIE is furious that we?re shelling out for a battery of crackpot laws by Labour. She said: ?Whoever heard of disturbing a box of eggs without permission? It diminishes the authority of basic tenets of English law as laid down in the Magna Carta of 1215.?

Got this today from CoTweet (which I like, it’s really the only CRM service for Twitter):

“CoTweet is not for everyone. It’s designed for teams who are managing the front-line of the real-time web for their organizations. It’s for people committed to engaging customers in authentic two-way conversations, rather than just broadcasting messages to followers.… If you’re interested in engaging with your customers in authentic, two-way dialogs, you really should give CoTweet another try.”

A quick group blog we set up today, with the idea of getting to try new stuff — and trying to break it. Trying to hate it in the hope that that will be impossible, a possible cure for gadget lust: Worthless Piece of Crap

Continuing this week’s them of rejection (a bloke could get paranoid), I’ve just heard that my (more in hope than expectation) 4iP project has been knocked back. If you don’t know what 4iP is then a quick look at their website should help, if you don’t care then it doesn’t matter (basically, funding for “public service interwebs”). I wasn’t after the money so much as the promise that they could link you up with other people that would complement your skills —I couldn’t have made my idea on my own.

My thing was very basically a “geo-stumble upon” a way to attache geo-data to the wealth of exsiting web content that doesn’t have it. Easy to use, but mainly building up a huge bak of useful data that people could do cool stuff with. Not local search, but “geo attention“.

Here’s what I submitted, in case you are interested — I think this would be a very good idea, so in lieu of me being involved in making it I’d like to throw it out to anyone who might:

Elevator Pitch

Geo-data is about to be the next big thing on the web, but people who make sites don’t know how and where sites are useful. People are also to busy to tag thier content. A bowser plugin/web service that allowed people to say “this content is useful to me here” or “this site is about here” — and then used this data to place sites on the earth as well as on the web (or at least peoples’ attention to them). Site plus open API allows local search for existing content — creating geo-data for the millions of sites without it.

Needs and Benefits

There are billions of pieces of content on the internet, but very few have any geodata attached to them — some because they aren’t geographically relevant, but many because the will/skills aren’t there to attach that data. One of the most difficult tasks on the web is local search, and even if new content is geotagged the existing net isn’t — this will really become apparent with the “hyperlocal revolution” having huge gaps.

Approach

Technically the idea is to make recording your “geo-attention” of a site as simple as possible — just one button click when signed in (using existing services: fireeagle/skyhook/google latitude etc to record location). Your profile can then be used to recommend sites based on your interests and location, you share your attention data, “friends” share your geo-bookmarks.